Odds Against Tomorrow (26 page)

“What am I worth? The profits of Future Days?”

He was sorry as soon as he said it.

“I deserve that. Sure I do. But I mean what I said.”

There was nothing casual about her. Fiercely opportunistic one moment, fiercely devoted the next. She did everything with an intensity that charmed and unnerved him equally. From her spastic canoe stroke to her chatty telephone manner with business clients, she was always committing her full energy, exhausting herself—total engagement all the time. And then his thoughts returned to Elsa, or rather all the Elsas—Elsa the Cripple, Elsa the Hippie, Elsa the Black Star, and Elsa, Nymph of the Fields—and he tried to figure out whether any of them existed in the place that she called the Actual World.

After half a mile the road bent again, now to the right. They turned the corner, and Mitchell understood why Judy wouldn’t drive them any farther.

4.

Were the circumstances different, were this the same world as the one into which he’d awoken on the day before Tammy hit, he might have assumed that the people were assembling for a county fair. Fried Dough, Tilt-A-Whirl, Milk Bottle Toss. Only their eyes were all wrong: fluttery, blinking, bloodshot. The mood was not carefree, not at all. This was high panic.

Families dragged luggage on wheels, college kids lumbered under hiking backpacks, and children sullenly kicked their sneakers on the ground as they walked. No one acknowledged anyone else. Several cars with New York license plates began to pass at speeds too high for a twisting dirt road. He wondered if any were the same cars he’d seen from his window before the storm, sitting in the traffic on the ramp to the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

“Is there some kind of refugee center around here?” asked Jane.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

By the time they reached the lake they could hear the mumbling noise of a crowd. Mitchell was out of breath. Not because of anxiety, he realized, but because he and Jane were rushing to keep pace with the others.

They found themselves in a traffic jam of dozens of abandoned vehicles. Past the cars were tents, set up in haphazard rows, facing the rock wall that marked the boundary of the Ticonderoga property. Personal belongings were scattered everywhere, as if at an auction. Two boys urinated beneath the broad wooden sign that welcomed visitors to Ticonderoga. The camp’s slogan had been rewritten in a graffiti scrawl.

CAMP TICONDEROGA

A PLACE FOR KIDDIES!

WHERE THE NEW LIFE BEGINS

There were more than a hundred people, perhaps twice that, sitting and standing and lying in sleeping bags. And lighting fires—campfires, bonfires, pyromaniac fires. But still there was too much smoke. Ash was falling like snow. Then he noticed a darker plume rising above the trees of the property itself.

“What the hell is going on?” said Mitchell.

“Hell,” said Jane. “Hell is going on.”

Mitchell felt a sharp prodding behind his knee. A skinny woman sat beside them in a lawn chair, a tattered issue of
Glamour
on her lap. She looked exhausted, lines cutting sharp diagonals from her nostrils. Her gray eyes were soft and watery in the smoke. Thick, straight black hair hung from her skull like overcooked spaghetti.

“Who’s that?” said the woman, pointing at Mitchell’s stomach. “On your shirt. Leonardo Fibo, Fibo—?”

“Fibonacci,” said Jane. “Hall of Fame field-goal kicker. Green Bay Packers. What, you never heard of him?”

The woman frowned. “Sounds like a dago.”

“Can I ask,” said Mitchell, “what exactly you are doing here?”

“Reading. Got a better idea?”

“I mean here.” He gestured at the road, the people camping out, the smoke, the chaos. “What is this?”

“Ticonderoga.” Seeing Mitchell’s confusion, she sat up straight and flipped her magazine over on her lap. “What, you just stumbled on this?”

“In a matter of speaking,” said Jane.

“It
was
a real good thing,” said the woman. “For the first couple days at least. If you could make yourself useful on the farm, you could stay. Indefinitely. They didn’t pay nothing, but they served food and the cabins have cots. Vegetables in the fields, water from a natural well. The water was clean and fresh.
Cold
. Bottom-of-the-ocean cold.”

Jane regarded this woman suspiciously, uncertain of her sanity.

“Ma’am,” she said, in a patient, anthropological tone, “if you don’t mind my asking—if things are so good in there, why are you out here?”

“It’s not safe
now
,” said the woman. “And law enforcement won’t come for days. They’re overwhelmed in the capital. It’s sad. This place was a little treasure, but they’ve ruined it now. Like they always do.”

“Who ruined it?”

“People. Human beings. Well, to be specific, men. It’s the men that did it. They’re doing it still.”

And Mitchell then noticed something about the crowd milling around them on the road: it was composed almost entirely of women and children. There were only a few elderly men, sprawled in the shade like wounded soldiers.

“What exactly is happening in there?” said Mitchell. “In the camp?”

“You want to know?” said the woman. She gave him a vicious sneer. “Take a look for yourself.”

Mitchell approached the front gate cautiously, Jane following. The gate—a black metal bar on a hinge—was unlocked. They entered the property. Fifteen feet ahead loomed a stand of pine trees. Behind it a slope led down to the camp. The dirt was soft under his sneakers; after the toxic filth they’d waded through in the ruined city, it might as well have been milk chocolate. The smoke grew thicker. Blackened pine needles cracked beneath their feet like little bones. When they came to the pines they could see the camp below. Jane grabbed his arm.

“Sweet Jesus,” said Jane. “Shine on.”

A series of buildings and fields lay arranged in a long strip along the plateau at the bottom of the slope. To the right were the softball and soccer fields. They were now bare dirt. The vegetables had been uprooted and messily devoured, as if by wild beasts; all that was left were scraps of torn vine and the occasional tomato lying on the ground, rotten and burst, oozing white bugs. To the left of the fields lay the tennis court, cleaved in half by a fallen electric pole. Directly below them was the large three-story wooden building that Mitchell knew to be the old infirmary. This is where Elsa and the others had slept. But no one would sleep there again. It was burning down. The wood walls shifted and bent, engulfed by wild curtains of flame. The roof had already collapsed in several places. The fire was deeply entrenched; it had moved in, taken up quarters. You could see it through the blown-out windows, lapping thirstily at the lintels from within. A file of elm trees stood beside the building; their leaves had vaporized. All that remained of their branches were attenuated fingers of charcoal. Mitchell could feel it even from where they stood, the crackling heat. Glowing embers floated over them like falling fireworks. He wondered if any of the embers were made of the letter Elsa had left for him on the bureau inside the infirmary.

“The new life,” said Jane. “This must be the new life.”

Farther left, across the plain, stood the mess hall and a smaller administrative cabin, its windows shattered. Another churned field, then a curving path that reached into the woods. Along the path you could see the bright green roofs of the wooden bunks where the campers had once slept. Additional bunks were visible in the distance, extending toward the shore. The lake seen through the trees was like jewelry hanging in the branches.

The full horror of the scene took a few seconds to reach him. His eyes, as upon entering a cave, had to adjust to the darkness. But now he could see them—the men. Most of them were shirtless. They roamed the bunk areas like foxes, uncertain, fidgety, huddling low to the ground, moving in packs. When the air cleared momentarily between puffs of smoke, Mitchell noticed other men, deeper in the woods, their faces covered with mud and leaves, branches tucked into their pants in a crude camouflage. They were hunting.

But where, in this madness, was Elsa Bruner? Where was her design? His escape from the city, sternman—it felt meaningless in the face of this pandemonium.

“Retreat!” yelled Jane in his ear. “
Re
-treat!”

And then they were both running as fast as they could. But they went in opposite directions: Jane back to the gate, Mitchell down the hill. The dry, rocky soil, covered by the blackened pine needles and charred acorns, raced beneath him. As he sprinted toward the burning infirmary, the warmth became heat, then the heat became a blaze, and he was a comet entering the atmosphere. His face was burning off.

“Mitchell! Oh God! Mitchell!”

When he heard the pain in Jane’s voice, the howling agony, he started to veer—it’d be so easy just to peel off to one side and avoid the house, run out into the field, away from danger and back to Jane. Yes, he realized, that would be the most logical option. And he remembered what Billy said in the message:
They let us move her back to the infirmary at Ticonderoga
.

So he kept running, accelerating as he flew down the slope. He was breathing deeply, and now the smoke, sharp and hot, was getting deep into his lungs, and it felt like he was ingesting the pine needles. He coughed bitterly, spitting black saliva. The air blurred. His eyes burned into the blurriness and he tried to make out details but there was only the nauseating blurriness. When he was within twenty feet of the building his foot caught and twisted, hard, spinning him, until the turf came up impatiently to smash his chin. The pain shook his mind into clarity, at least long enough to acknowledge the madness of what he was doing, and he felt the perverse satisfaction of total recklessness. It felt nothing like the canoe exodus from the city. That was dangerous, but it was calculated danger, better than the prospect of being marooned in his apartment without food and water. You couldn’t make the same argument for running into a burning building.

He was lying beneath one of the elm trees. He had tripped on a root, which now, like a crooked elbow, pressed into his ribs. The air at the ground was relatively clean. He inhaled deeply, and his exhalations were little puffs of smoke. It was just like breathing steam in the winter. From this position he was at an angle to the infirmary and could see slightly around it, to a section of the building that seemed to have been spared by the flames. It was a back entrance. There was a step that led to a green screen door. The door rattled slightly in its frame, breathing in and out. He didn’t want to get up, the air on the ground was so sweet and clean, but he begged himself to get up because he knew that Elsa was behind that door.

The tree above him was crackling and the smaller branches glowed golden. Mitchell felt dizzy and forgot what he was doing here, lying on the ground. It would be quite pleasant, he decided, to sleep at the foot of this tree. But as his eyes closed something pulled him, and he knew that it was Elsa, the Black Star, drawing him toward her, and then he was stumbling back to his feet and running the last twenty feet to the infirmary.

He tried to hold the clean air in his lungs but when he ran around the side of the building he found that the air was clearer; a breeze was blowing from the lake, pushing the smoke up the hill. He prepared himself for what would come next. First he would have to remove whatever tubes were plugged into her. He’d make sure she was wearing her gown. Then he’d roll her out of the bed and over his shoulder. It wouldn’t be difficult to lift her; she was very small and no doubt had lost weight during her hospitalization. He would carry her away, not up the hill, at least not at first, but to the softball field. Then he could return, grab whatever medication or tubes or serums he could find in her room, and stuff them into his pockets; and finally, assuming none of the men from the bushes tried to interfere—just let them try!—he would carry Elsa up the slope to safety.

Some distant part of his brain told him to stand out of the way when he opened the door, that the surge of oxygen might ignite a spark, but the other part of his brain, the part that was now dominant, made him pull the door back hard and rush in without hesitation. And then he was inside the infirmary.

He was in a dark yellow room. There was no fire or smoke. But the walls were melting. Brown spots bloomed on the dark yellow wallpaper, and the paper was curling off in wide strips, exposing a glutinous, whitish plaster. It looked as if he were surrounded by bananas that were peeling themselves. He realized that this was not a bedroom at all, but a small doctor’s office. There was a shelf that held cardboard boxes of gauze and latex gloves and pill bottles. The glass pill bottles had burst, and there was brown and green glass sprinkled on the floor. There was a small examination table with dark yellow padding and a metal scale and a steel sink. There was a steel counter on which there were arrayed steel tongs, a plastic bowl filled with dark yellow lozenges, a reflex hammer, a blood pressure cuff, and the remains of a shattered jar of tongue depressors. The depressors had spilled onto the floor, which was a pattern of checkerboard squares done in brown and silver. An old thermometer lay at the edge of the counter, and Mitchell bent to read it. It must have been broken, because it read 208°F. Mitchell wiped a great sleeve of sweat from his face. There was no other person in the room.

At the far end, there was a brown door. Mitchell’s thinking began again to slow down and this time he decided to feel the door before opening it. It was not any hotter than the air, so he opened the door and looked into a second room.

This was not a bedroom, not exactly, more like an alcove, though there was a single bed in it. The bedsheets had been pulled back, revealing the mattress. There was an IV stand beside it, and on a table near the doorway there were about a dozen empty orange prescription bottles. Mitchell looked at one of the labels. It said, in a sloppy cursive: “Isoproterenol—dissolve 10mg in 1 gallon purified water/
BRUNER, ELSA.
”